


Evolution

by thedevilchicken



Category: Pitch Black (2000), The Chronicles of Riddick Series
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death Fix, F/M, Post-Canon, Serial Killers, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 13:00:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4626183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Riddick goes back for Fry, dead or alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Evolution

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raktajinos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raktajinos/gifts).



She slaps him across the face and says, “You _left me_.”

He guesses that’s fair. But to be even fairer, he’d been pretty sure she was dead. 

\---

After the rain and serpents and Johns Sr, after his head _not_ winding up in a box, he went back to M6-117. He’d long since given up trying to recall all the dumbass designations of all the planets he’d visited, if you could call what he did _visiting_ , but M6-117 stuck in his head. He guessed he knew why.

For the first few days in the ship heading that direction he wasn’t even sure why he was going there. He told himself it was strategic because who’d look for him on a deserted planet out in the middle of no-fucking-where, but then there was the problem that it was, well, _no-fucking-where_. He might be able to get some water together if the equipment still worked but he’d run out of food before he made a dent in the ship’s water supplies anyway. He didn’t like the idea of hunting the damn raptors, either, and it wasn’t like they’d looked particularly edible. It was a dumb move, but he was making it anyway.

He aimed for the wreck of the Hunter Gratzner and he touched down in the sand. By that point he knew why he was there and it had nothing to do with laying low, it had nothing to do with Boss Johns’ woe-is-me agitation over his long lost boy Billy. He was there for Carolyn Fry. More than Johns, more than Imam, even more than Jack - Kyra, what the fuck - he was still pissed off at the universe over Carolyn Fry.

\---

“How was I meant to know you’d lived?” he says. 

She hits him again, the look on her face as hard as her fists, which is to say pretty damn hard. 

“Did you even _look_?”

“Why would I?”

“Because I was _alive_!”

He admits defeat and lets her beat her fists against his chest like maybe it’ll get it out of her system, but he guesses she’ll get tired of it before it’s even part way over. 

“You’re lucky I came back at all,” he says, and when she stops fucking beating him she gives him a look like maybe _lucky_ is a relative term.

“Get me away from here,” she says.

He figures he can do that.

\---

It took him three days - what might’ve been three days on any other fucking world, one that didn’t have suns just the way he imagined hell did - to work his way through the wreckage. 

There was nothing useful there, really: some MREs he could eat if he got really fucking desperate, Ogilvie’s damn antiques that he humped into the ship thinking maybe he could move them on later, a big old parasol he started walking around with because hell if he was going to get sunburned searching around in all that goddamn sand and twisted metal for a woman he owed absolutely nothing, _nothing_ , not a thing. 

He picked up a jacket that’d belonged to Johns and it just about fit him so he put it on, too hot but it’d be better than his arms burning to a crisp as he sucked on his oxygen tube in the heat. He sifted through all of the assorted crap, wondering if there was anything else worth salvaging till he realised: another power node was gone. Either the raptors had grown a brain in their ugly-ass heads or someone else was there. At least someone had been; who the fuck knew if they were still alive. It wasn’t exactly the fucking Ritz.

Maybe it was her, he thought, no idea why the idea got his blood up the way it did. Maybe Carolyn Fry was still alive.

\---

“What happened to the others?” she asks, in the copilot’s seat once they’ve lifted off that godforsaken rock. 

He shakes his head. “Dead,” he says, and then holds up his hands off the stick for a second, only long enough for the ship to dip and not crash. “Not me.”

“And why should I trust you?”

“I’ll tell you the whole damn story if you like,” he says. “I’m pretty sure you can trust I’m not smart enough to make that shit up.”

She almost-smiles in spite of herself. She looks tired, and he thinks that’s kind of ironic under the circumstances. 

“Tell me,” she says. 

So he does.

\---

When he found her she was in cryosleep over at the geological station and he guessed he was pretty impressed by that. 

For a second-class pilot, apparently she’d been pretty resourceful; she’d stripped out the essentials from a couple of the wrecked cryopods back on the wreck of the Hunter Gratzner and used the sandcat to bring the parts over, hooked it all together with the sandcat’s solar generator as its primary power source and the ship’s part-damaged node as a backup. There she was, ashen and gaunt and kinda beat up but apparently alive. And so he woke her up. He didn’t think she’d want to sleep forever.

Maybe she’d gotten the settings wrong because she didn’t wake right away but he guess he couldn’t blame her for that; she crumpled out of the pod so he caught her and hauled her outside, sat her down in the sand to get warm again. She woke up in stages and he watched her do it as he crouched in front of her, fingers twitching, head rolling, eyelids flickering as she breathed again and then she opened her eyes. They snapped right open and she looked straight at him in the too-bright goddamn sunlight. 

“Thought you were gonna sleep all day,” he said. 

She just reached out and pushed him over on his ass in the sand. He laughed as he picked himself up and dusted himself off but she didn’t look amused. 

\---

The story doesn’t impress her one iota as he tells it, but she seems to believe him and that’s enough for now. They head away from the planet and she doesn’t look back for a second. He thinks maybe he’s glad he did.

“You gonna tell me what happened down there?” he asks. She scowls; he guesses that’s a no. He guesses he doesn’t really care but she’ll tell him if she feels that way inclined and maybe it’s an interesting story.

She goes into the cabin and stretches out on a bunk where she sleeps sixteen hours straight like she’s not been in cryosleep for months already. When she wakes up she stuffs three MREs in her face and drinks two whole pints of water, but her body’s not up to that yet so he’s not surprised when she chucks it up in the crappy little bathroom. Two hours later she tries again and keeps everything down this time. 

“Did you loot these?” she asks, once she’s eaten again, gesturing at the antiques in crates on the cabin floor. “Did you even go down there to find me or were you just looking for a payday?”

He shrugs. “Like I said,” he says, “I thought you were dead. I thought I was looking for your fucking skull picked clean.”

She sighs, apparently not fazed at all by that and he guesses he’s already used some of his better lines on her. It’s not the lines she’s not fazed by anymore: it’s him. That’s new. 

“I bet it would’ve made a really nice trophy,” she says. “You’re sick.”

“We’re all a little sick, Carolyn.”

She looks away but she doesn’t disagree. 

\---

She took every last power source she could find on that godawful sand-ridden jerkwater planet and she rigged it to blow. Riddick helped, oddly fascinated by the whole thing as they set it up, but it was mostly her. 

They spent three days at it, hooking up makeshift jury-rigged bombs at the mouths of caves, dangling one down into the pit in the coring room, making sure they hit all the hot spots. The geological team had left some pretty heavy-duty equipment, some explosives too because what was geological survey mission without a healthy supply of TNT, and that helped. Riddick started to wonder where in the hell she’d come from before the Hunter Gratzner because she knew her way around that shit pretty well. Maybe some shitty mining colony, he thought, but he didn’t ask. 

“We’re ready,” she said. He didn’t disagree, not only because this was her show, not his. He was pretty sure it was gonna work out just the way she’d planned and he was pretty sure he didn’t wanna be there when she set it off so he just nodded and they headed for his purloined ship.

They hung down in the atmosphere close enough to see it when she set that shit off remotely, the sand going up in plumes and collapsing down all wreathed in flames. Maybe she’d wanted to go back for Jack and Imam months ago when day turned into night but apparently she wished _something_ harm - he could almost hear the raptors’ screams, metaphoric-like. It wasn’t like they deserved it, they were just doing what came naturally, what evolution had made them do. Sometimes he thought he was more like them than he was like her. 

Then he looked at her face as they hovered there, watched her watching as thousands of creatures had to be dying beneath the sand, and he guessed he didn’t care if he was like her or not. The smile on her face and the look in her eyes was beautiful.

\---

He heads for the nearest habitable planet because he’s not going into cryosleep again and risking getting taken down on some other poor, fucked up excuse for a world. 

He’s got money, or as good as, because the ship that’s not his would have a price if he asked it and half the shit in it is both portable and valuable; they trade some equipment for a room in a shambles of a boarding house, two dusty beds and Riddick’s almost surprised she’s stayed with him. He figures she’s got no job now, no family or she wouldn’t’ve taken up as a pilot in the first place, no prospects now she’s crashed a ship and fucked off into the great unknown with a wanted killer, but she could’ve left. She could’ve taken some of Ogilvie’s antiques and traded her way onto a ship out to a decent world like a decent person but there she is, pacing in the room they’ve rented. 

“It’s not a cell,” he says. “Trust me, I’ve seen cells. You can leave anytime.”

She shoots him a glare and if looks could kill he’d be fucking incinerated. 

They eat in a bar, shitty food but it’s _real_ food and not that synthetic shit, not that it makes any difference to Carolyn’s mood. She drinks too much and it’s back-room bathtub moonshine so strong it makes even Riddick’s head light, but she knocks a few back before they head back to the room. She leans on him even though she doesn’t mean to and glares at him like it’s his fault she’s doing it. 

“What do I do now?” she asks, later, like she’s asking the fucking universe and not asking him. 

“Anything you wanna do,” he replies anyway, and she scowls in his direction but after that she gets pensive as she sits there on her bed. Then she stretches out, falls asleep fully clothed with the lights on. 

When she sleeps, it’s like she _knows_ he’s not gonna do any of the things Johns probably told her he’d do. Even he doesn’t know that, so he wonders how she could. 

\---

They spent half a day in orbit, getting things stowed once the planet was well and truly dead and not just sand and bones on top and raptors writhing underneath the surface. Carolyn ignored him. He could live with that. Maybe he deserved it.

He plotted a course and she corrected it in the nav computer, always the pilot; he chuckled and then he idled a while longer, seeing what she’d do, seeing if she’d give in and talk to him though he guessed she’d had months without any kind of companionship so she could probably go a while longer yet. 

“What happened down there?” he asked her. She shrugged. “I thought for sure they’d eat you.” She didn’t even glance in his direction. “Are you still pissed at me? C’mon, Carolyn, it’s getting old.”

She slapped him across the face and said, “You _left me_.”

He guessed that was fair. But to be even fairer, he’d been pretty sure she was dead.

“How was I meant to know you’d lived?”

She hit him again. “Did you even _look_?”

“Why would I?”

“Because I was _alive_!”

He let her beat her fists against his chest like that might have helped somehow, like what she needed wasn’t a stiff drink and a good psychiatrist and he was pretty sure he had current access to neither. 

“You’re lucky I came back at all.”

She glared. “Get me away from here,” she said. So he did.

\---

It turns out what she wants to do is kill things or die trying and that’s a stance Riddick decides he can support. 

He buys her a gun on the next planet, teaches her to shoot and she’s pretty good but he guesses he can’t be too surprised by that. He buys her a knife the next time and he teaches her to fight with it, bit by bit, day by day, week by week in the back of the ship as they skip between planets. After a couple of weeks they take a job and they hunt a guy through a platinum mine on some backwater hellhole and when they transport him over to Slam City Riddick stays in the ship and he wonders, somewhere in the back of his head, if she’s gonna turn him in for the bounty, too. Maybe she thinks about it, but she doesn’t do it. 

The next one’s _dead or alive_ so she shoots him point blank and she takes him in dead. 

“Is it always like that?” she says after, shaking, and he takes hold of her arms but she flinches away. 

“Yeah, it’s always like that,” he tells her. “Did you like it?”

She nods. He’s surprised she’s not scared to admit it as she stands there, shivering, wrapping her arms around herself. And then she looks at him and her face is flushed and the next second she’s pointing her gun at him. He wasn’t expecting that. She can still surprise him.

“You gonna shoot me?” he asks. She doesn’t look calm enough for that but fuck knows because he doesn’t. 

She doesn’t shoot him. She kisses him instead. 

It’s hot and heavy, heady, her gun still in one hand as she shoves him up against the bulkhead and he lets her because fuck, he talked it up enough when they were last together, down on M6-117 the first time. She pulls off his goggles and he curses at her but she just laughs and tosses them away and so he grabs her, turns her, shoves her up against the bulkhead with her legs around his waist and she pulls the gun up there right under his chin. 

“Are you going to do it or do I have to shoot you?” she asks and he laughs lowly as he kisses her neck, holding her there except she squirms against him, shoves up with the gun and comes down onto her feet with a thud when he releases her. She tosses the gun away and it looks like it was just a prop after all as she untucks his shirt and runs her hands up underneath so he pulls it off and she bites at his chest, hard, making him curse but that just makes her laugh. He’s not sure if she’s laughing at him or the situation and guesses he doesn’t give a fuck which it is.

They don’t manage to get their clothes all the way off, boots in the way of stripping out of pants and she’s still wearing her shirt as she shoves him down on his bunk and straddles him, takes his cock in her hand. She doesn’t go as far as to compliment him but she looks pleased to find he’s not lacking south of the border as she shifts and shimmies and fuck, she’s so damn wet when she settles down on him, her knees spread wide, trying to find the right angle. His hands go to her hips but she pulls them away, pulls them up over his head and she leans down, holds him there as she rocks hard against him. He could struggle but he can’t see a reason to. 

When he looks at her in the harsh cabin lights with his shined eyes it’s like she’s on fucking fire. She’s beautiful like this, he thinks. She’s what evolution’s made her. 

\---

“They were saving me for later,” she says. 

They’ve put their clothes back on, tucked in shirts and returned underwear to sensible positions but kicked off their boots and she’s sitting there crosslegged on his bunk like that’s normal and she’s not been glaring at him on and off for a fucking month. 

“They ate Johns first. They tore him into little pieces and ate him bit by bit, probably because he was fresh. Then they started on the corpses.” She glances at him. “You know. The ones who died in the crash. They'd hoarded them.”

“And you were dessert.” 

She smiles wryly. “Something like that,” she says. 

She tells him she ran through caves in the dark, scraping her nails right off her fingers on the walls while she heard the raptors coming for her. She tells him she thought she was gonna die and he doesn’t say _so how was I meant to know you lived?_ ‘cause that seems insensitive somehow. She says she stumbled out into a cave covered in glow worms and there was this pool of iridescent glow worm shit and it wasn’t a pleasant place to be but the raptors wouldn’t come near her there. 

The stuff glowed for hours, long enough for her to get back to the ship, get food and water and get back there to relative safety, if you could call a cave where the only thing between her and certain death was an eerie glow. She had no idea how long she’d been there, barely sleeping, fucking fevered, cuts and scrapes infected, the raptors baying. She had no way to know. She still doesn’t. She never will.

He knows what came after that already, how the suns had come up and she’d gotten herself into cryosleep. That much he’s figured out for himself. 

“We should take out Johns’ father before he comes after us,” she says. “They might have equipment we can use, too.”

He chuckles, deep down in his chest as he stretches out on his bunk and she follows him down, right at his side. 

“What’s funny?”

“Here I thought you were just a pilot with a half-pretty face.”

He thinks no such thing, and she knows it. 

He turns off the main lights as they drift through space toward the next planet, toward their next target, and as she shifts in closer to him, as she drifts into sleep he watches her in the dark. 

These days he figures there’s an equal chance she’ll kill him in his sleep as he’ll kill her, even if she’s rationalised it all in her head like what it is is righteous kills and not just murder to ease her past her nightmares into dreamless sleep. Maybe if she’s the monster under the bed she’ll be safe. 

He figures she might kill him or he might kill her and one or the other will take the ship and leave, go somewhere else, go anywhere else, go wherever they want to go. But for now, it seems to him they’re both right where they want to be.

He closes his eyes. He’ll go ahead and take his chances.


End file.
